How to implement chat application in C# MVC?

What technology stack to use for a basic ERP implemented as a web application (and other concerns)?

• Hello good folks! I am taking up a small-scale freelance project and need some help from experienced developers. My background: I have decent experience with Core Java in the past but have been working in C++ for the last 2 years. I have received training in some Java EE concepts/frameworks like http://www.coderanch.com/forums/f-58/Struts, http://www.coderanch.com/forums/f-7/Servlets etc. My knowledge of available technologies is severely limited, but fundamental programming ability is high. The project: I am building an ERP system from the ground up for a 30 person organization in the trading sector. The system will be built module (like CRM, inventory management etc) by module, and will be quite simple in terms of functionality. The true challenge is in building a product for very novice users and understanding their requirements correctly. Approach so far: Since most of the use-cases can be solved by using the MVC approach, given my past familiarity Java (plus how easy it was to use), and the familiarity most people have with browsers, I want to build a web application that will be hosted within the company's intranet. This is the only design decision so far. Questions: 1) This is the first time I'm embarking on an individual project like this, any advice is greatly appreciated. 2) What set of technologies (Java frameworks?) are a good fit for this project? My front-end skills are very low, and I want to minimize the efforts there. 3) The product will be incrementally delivered. How can I achieve this? How to design to support upgrades? 4) My knowledge of packaging an application for release and installation is almost null. Any resources for learning this? Specifically, a DB like MySQL will be required on the host machine, how to package this? 5) One of the biggest challenges is that the users are not at all tech-savvy and will not be able to deal with failures. How can I guarantee a very robust end-product, with minimal number of outages that require them to contact me (and lose access to their ERP in the time being) ? 6) How do I select a server (tomcat? http://www.coderanch.com/forums/f-63/JBoss?) to be well-suited for this project? 7) I remember ORM being powerful but difficult to implement. Is it really important? Or should I just usehttp://www.coderanch.com/forums/f-3/JDBC method calls to execute queries? 8) Any thoughts on creating back-ups (to prevent loss of business data) and logging? I took up this project to learn and because I am passionate about this giving customized solutions (want to turn this project into a reusable product and build a career out of it). Please share your expertise on the above questions and any concerns that my inexperience could have caused me to overlook. Also, any relevant resources that would be really useful. Thanks for reading

• Answer:

  In my opinion: If you want to avoid HTML-like languages, and Java, then you have limited choices for web development. The only one I can think of is and its derived project, Vaadin. This will give you a programming model similar to Java Swing. The drawback is the output does not look too nice, in my opinion. For packaging and upgrades, the convention is still to ship SQL files for schema creation. The upgrades would be "migration files" that perform the alter table statements, and the like. I'm not familiar with tools that can do this for hand-crafted SQL. I just took a look and found this, might be worth trying - http://flywaydb.org/ Aside from the SQL file, there is no convention for installing MySQL along with the app server. The sysadmin will need to do this manually. (This is the reason why Java apps ship with an embedded Java database, which are not as performant.) For the server selection, will work since you seem to be using Java for plain "CRUD" (Create/Replace/Update/Delete). Embedded is another choice if you want to launch your app from the command line or from a GUI. would be useful for other parts of the Java EE stack - and features are the most important nowadays, next to the web platform. also has a rich web platform which I haven't tried - http://www.jboss.org/errai For , this really depends on the architecture and your level of complexity in the SQL code. ORM has clear benefits on a clustered system, since it introduces caching, but you are running on a single . I skipped: robustness of the end product - that is a big topic and covers architecture, coding and operations. I'll try to come back to this later. backups - I'm not familiar with MySQL backup options.